Hingston: Coady’s latest book a superb collection

Edmonton author returns to tried and true subjects in Hellgoing

Edmonton author Lynn Coady’s new book is called Hellgoing.

Photograph by: Greg Southam
, Edmonton Journal

Originally published Thursday, July 25, 2013

EDMONTON - Remember The Antagonist? That brooding, emotionally fraught, and bestselling novel, full of masculine angst and late-night email sessions, that was shortlisted for the Giller Prize in 2011 and went on to garner near-unanimous accolades for its author, Lynn Coady?

Well, the Edmontonian’s newest book, the story collection Hellgoing (House of Anansi), hits bookstores this week. And it’s even better.

This new collection arrives more than a dozen years after Coady’s first, Play the Monster Blind, from 2000. Its nine stories have been gathered from a time period nearly as long. But Coady says that Hellgoing is much more than a clearing house of whatever was sitting in her desk drawer.

“I’m always writing across the same themes,” she says, pointing out that conformity, faith, and the impossibility of human relationships are often the glue that holds her work together. “But with short stories I’m doing something different than with novels. In some ways, they’re coming from a much deeper place.”

Coady says it’s hard to talk about these seemingly ineffable moments of inspiration “without sounding really airy-fairy.” But, basically, writing stories is instinctual: “You can catch a scent in the wind — an idea, or a concept — and follow it. You can delve into your subconscious and see what happens, in a way you just can’t when you’re writing a novel.”

Such a scent fuels Mr. Hope. The most recently written story, it follows the uneasy relationship between one female student and the gruff vice-principal who thinks he’s looking out for her best interests. We open on their first meeting, when Mr. Hope stands at the front of her Grade One classroom, next to a boy whose eye is literally dangling out of its socket, and uses him to gruesomely illustrate a lesson for the rest of the class: “This is what can happen … if you throw a rock in the schoolyard.”

Incredibly, this tableau is plucked entirely from Coady’s own childhood.

“When I talk about it, I think, ‘Could that have happened?’” she says. “Maybe it didn’t even happen. Maybe it was a dream. Whether it happened or not, it’s a memory I have. And it never left me.”

Coady says that, despite not knowing for months on end where this story was going, she knew she had to be true to the impulse that got her writing it in the first place.

“I just have to trust that the story is going to shake out in such a way that’s going to be palatable to readers,” she says. “Because some of them don’t end so well.” (In the book’s acknowledgments, Coady thanks her husband, as well as fellow author Marina Endicott, for help with the ending to Mr. Hope specifically.)

It’s true that the new stories often return to Coady’s tried and true subjects. Take This and Eat It, for instance, has a salty take on religious orthodoxy that’s instantly recognizable to fans of her early work. Clear Skies is about a writers’ retreat where one woman tries to both outrun the notoriety of her teenage memoir, and to fit into whatever rigid expectations her students and fellow faculty have of her. And The Natural Elements finds one Edmontonian continually frustrated by the rest of the world’s failure to adhere to his moral code. “It might as well be a religion (to him),” Coady says. “People are sinning against it all the time, and he’s constantly feeling his own temptation.”

But other stories show that Coady’s perspective has shifted with time. Opening story Wireless takes place in Atlantic Canada, as much of Coady’s other work has — but this one is narrated by a complete outsider, a visiting magazine writer, as she struggles to decode the nuances of Newfoundland hospitality and seduction.

It’s all part of the wider palette that Coady says comes with having lived all around the country. Take Hart, the lithe, West Coast musician/yogi from Body Condom. “A character like Hart is not an Atlantic-Canadian character,” Coady says. “He could not be found on the East Coast. If he could, he would be a completely different kind of guy.”

Alberta has given her some additional tools to work with.

“If I want to write a story about having your life put in miserable upheaval in the dead of winter” — that’d be The Natural Elements again — “I’m glad to have the Edmonton experience, to know what the dead of winter is really like.”

Hellgoing is a superb collection, end to end, and easily one of the best books I’ve read so far in 2013. But one of its standout stories, Dogs in Clothes, deserves extra credit for taking as its subject one of the unsung heroes of the publishing world: the publicist.

“The one thing I’ve always done as an author is talk to my publicists,” Coady says. “Because they have all the best stories — and they have all the dirt on other, more famous and important writers. They’re not supposed to talk about it, but sometimes you can get awesome little tidbits from them.”

By the end of Coady’s story, her protagonist has her own fair share of tidbits. Sam has been charged with ferrying a very famous male author around Toronto on a strict schedule; along the way she has to contend with editors, radio and television hosts, hot sauce promoters, and inconveniently placed downtown fences. Meanwhile, she’s all but chained to her smartphone, which buzzes constantly, “like some tiny panicked creature.”

“I’ve only ever met one male publicist,” Coady says. “They tend to be young women who are basically run off their feet. There’s something caste-y about that. It’s a certain kind of young woman: educated, and on her way up the ladder, but in the meantime we’re going to use her as a dog’s body.”

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